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Chris Nathan's avatar

There is a category confusion in this essay. While it is certainly the case that all “classic game[s] of debate” are also arguments, it is most definitely not the case that all arguments are also debates, classic or otherwise. Most arguments are not debates at all, but a kind of low-grade, managed conflict whose purpose has little or nothing to do with “the agonistic search for truth.” People who have children will recognize the difference instantly, as will people with parents, people with siblings, people who are married, people with coworkers, people with friends, people whose name has a vowel in it somewhere, etc.

The difference between debate - and all of the other forms that argument takes - matters a lot. For people engaged in rational debate the pursuit of “winning” makes a kind of interim sense. The antagonistic scheme enforces a rigor that practically no one can bring to bear on him or herself. Rational debate stress tests the structural integrity of our thought. For the serious person “losing” a real debate is the greatest victory of all. Truth itself will have won out, and its devotee rewarded, however uncomfortable the journey. Serious people can remember times when they discovered errors in their thinking and their convictions then shifted. Ideologues cannot.

In any case what most of us are dealing with in our day to day lives is not the challenge and opportunity of rational debate. Matt Lutz’s piece acknowledges as much. The ancient admonition about where not to cast your pearls applies.

Still, the swollen river of irrationality rolls on. Many of us – more and more urgently - can’t help feeling the need to take some kind of stand if liberal culture itself is not to be washed out to sea. My experience has been that arguing to win makes everything worse, poisons personal relationships, and provides at best a sullen acquiescence in the “defeated” and at worst a resentful truce. But what is to be done? These times seem different, when “this too shall pass” sounds anemic, timid, irresponsible. One possibility is that we exchange the rhetoric of debate with something like the rhetoric of inquiry, where the aim of our speech becomes the asking of questions rather than the discovery of conclusions . Can we, by example, show people how to actually think? Can we make it our objective to have people think who are only accustomed to having thoughts? To do so we will have to think ourselves. We can begin by asking, “what is the nature of conversations that induce actual thinking?” It is unlikely that the answer will be, “By winning arguments.”

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Charles Barzun's avatar

I'm sympathetic with the spirit of this argument, but I think the issue of ad hominem argument is trickier than you suggest. You write, "If you offer an argument that x is true, and I respond by attacking you, I’m not actually addressing the argument that x is true. If I question your motives, I’m just changing the subject from the truth of x to an unrelated question about your personality. But even if you are a bad person, you might have given a good argument for x. And if you’ve given a good argument for x, this gives me a compelling reason to believe your proposition."

But what if I offer an argument in support of free speech, arguing that it's both a human right and an important element of democratic culture. You then respond by pointing to the way in which powerful elites (including courts) have invoked "free speech" in order insulate those with economic power from regulation or redistributive measures (or those with social power to dominate the voices of those without it), thereby increasing inequality in a way that is bad for democracy. Is that an "ad hominem" argument? It's not in the sense that it's not attacking the motives of the person making the argument, but it is in the sense that it's not directly attacking my argument "on the merits" but instead pointing to the function that my argument as served (which is what "motivation" arguments are usually trying to do).

Is that a legitimate argument or Calvinball? This is not a rhetorical question--I think it's a hard question. The point is just to complicate the idea of what ad hominem argument consists in. Anyway, thanks for your very interesting essay.

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